Feeling Right in The Ambassadors

Abstract

Feeling Right in The Ambassadors Anne Langendorfer "Feeling right" was an important idea in nineteenth-century American literature, as many novels from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)1 to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)2 attest. But when in The Ambassadors (1903) James takes up this crucial phrase, he offers readers a new idea: that "feeling right" can be understood as the meeting point between emotion and ethics for both characters and readers. Throughout the novel, James shows the protagonist, Lambert Strether, struggling with the concept of "right" feeling: Strether "wanted to feel right about it, but could only, at best, for the time, feel vague" (315). Strether's desire to feel right opens a gaping vagueness, which leaves readers, too, feeling bewildered. In keeping readers close to Strether through the novel's focalization, James invites the authorial audience to consider not only characters' emotions and ethics but also their own emotions about and ethical judgments of these characters. In The Ambassadors, to feel right is neither a command to readers, as practiced by Stowe,3 nor an entirely ironic statement, as articulated by Twain, but rather a desire shared and interrogated by characters and readers alike. Indeed, both Stowe's and Twain's uses of the phrase "feeling right" leave behind a persistent question about the efficacy of sympathy: how far can sympathy take readers? In The Ambassadors, James offers readers an opportunity to engage with the notion of feeling right as an emotional process, focalizing the story through Strether's self-questioning dialogue with himself and therefore suggesting that a specific and complex affective education is required of characters and readers in order for anyone to make claims about right feeling. More broadly, I argue, James's concept of emotion is tied to a larger emotional-ethical conversation in the late nineteenth century about the nature of "feeling right" and how one achieves this condition through reading.4 As Faye Halpern proposes in her clever and generative 2018 investigation of James's meditation on sentimentality in The Bostonians, James is not as dismissive of sentimentality as many critics have argued and indeed is deeply engaged with it. [End Page 251] Halpern suggests that the sentimental novel's reading practice of cultivating readers' sympathetic identification with characters is important in James's work, even as it is often replaced in James's novels by "a love of difficulty, a toleration of ambiguity, and judgment borne of critical distance" (63). In Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy (2015), Melanie Dawson argues that James and other realist authors have moved "beyond sympathy" toward the act of analyzing and cataloging emotion (103). I agree with Halpern and Dawson that James's novels portray emotion differently and therefore create different reading experiences, refusing readers easy sympathetic identification with protagonists like Lambert Strether. But how then do we feel about Strether? His desire to feel right encourages readers to engage with a sustained feeling of affection for the difficulty, ambiguity, and judgment-making process with which James requires readers to engage. If Strether's own right feeling is achieved only through a novel-long process of emotional-ethical change, then we must also attend to the ways in which this process affects readers. Emotion and ethics work together in The Ambassadors to encourage readers to engage ambivalent emotional responses, as Kate Stanley and Joshua Held suggest. In this short essay, I suggest a rhetorical narrative approach that combines ethics with emotion, yielding new insights for understanding James's complex communication to his authorial audience. Given the space limitations, I will offer (drawing on James Phelan's work in Experiencing Fiction) an overarching sketch of the narrative progression from the global instability to key complication to resolution, focusing on the complexities of the ending, to describe this process. I use this framework of narrative progression to insist on the importance of seeing the interactions between the judgments of characters and the authorial audience as integral to understanding the reading experience as one attuned to a skeptical engagement with Strether's understanding of himself as, finally, not only feeling but being right. Narrative Progression and Instabilities: Knowledge, Ethics...